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Art News:
Virgil de Voldere Gallery presents
Alejandra Seeber, La Bourgeoisie
Exhibition dates: June 1 to July 30, 2010
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 10, 2010, from 6-8 PM
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Alejandra Seeber: La Bourgeoisie
For immediate release
Alejandra
Seeber: La Bourgeoisie
Dates: June 1 - July 30, 2010
Opening: June 10, 2010, 6 - 8 pm
Location: 526 West 26th Street - 4th
Floor
-
Room 416 - New York, NY
Gallery
Hours: Tuesday
to
Saturday 11 am - 6 pm and Saturday 12 - 6 pm and by appointment. Closed
Saturdays in July.
Paintings are
beautiful
objects not necessarily prized for their practicality and usefulness. For La
Bourgeoisie, the New York-based
artist
Alejandra Seeber turns this notion on its head for her second exhibition
at
Virgil de Voldère Gallery, using her canvases and stretchers not to
decorate
walls but to build them. While Seeber's imagery has often investigated
the
elusive meaning and mysterious qualities of unpopulated interior spaces,
here
she activates an interior
by
constructing a dwelling with an architectural combination of her paintings.
While recently in
Argentina,
her home country, Seeber traveled by car through the slums of
Buenos
Aires-known as the villas
miserias-to
a glass shop, where she was working on a sculpture. Along the way she
observed
dilapidated houses made of cardboard, wood, tin, plastic, and other
discarded
materials. For Argentinians building homes in these shantytowns,
do-it-yourself
is not an aesthetic-it's a necessary way of life, and especially so in the
wake
of the country's fiscal crisis nearly ten years ago that widened the
gap
between rich and poor.
Artists are often
uniquely
positioned as a medium or catalyst between the world of the
elites-those
consumers of high fashion, luxury vacations, expensive automobiles, and,
of
course, fine art-and the life of the lower classes. Ever since Édouard
Manet
painted street beggars as noble philosophical subjects 150 years ago,
artists
have dealt with the contradictions of class positions in various ways. But in
a
commercial gallery in 2010, can painting still faithfully address social
issues
without resorting to heavy-handed didacticism?
Seeber's house
of
paintings,
a collection of colliding images, attempts to do just that. While several
works
have been previously exhibited, many are "extras" that never left the
artist's
studio, an approach that echoes the scavengers of the villas miserias. We
normally would admire the artist's quick
brush
and expressive technique in the paintings, but her gallery installation
also
encourages us to transcend aesthetics to contemplate on
architectural,
functional, and political levels
Punctuating the
concepts
running throughout La Bourgeoisie is
a
lone painting by the Argentinian-Italian artist Augusto Maurandi, titled
Justice, that hangs nearby Seeber's house. Depicting
an
old-fashioned weight scale flung against a sky-blue background, with
actual
chains affixed to the canvas, the work conveys a powerful suggestion that
law
and decency have been tossed away like unwanted waste, leaving viewers
to
wonder for whom justice is served.
Please contact the
gallery
for further information: + 1 212 343 9694.
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Virgil de Voldere Gallery | 526 West 26th Street
room 416 | New York | NY |
10001
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